Elizabeth Kostova’s 2005 romp through vampire lore, The Historian, was a giddy, guilty pleasure that sold more than three million copies and ushered in the current wave of fangtastic phenomena — Twilight, True Blood, et al.
Concerned as it is with art, madness and obsession, Kostova’s new novel, The Swan Thieves, keeps the Gothic flame burning. In fact it owes more than a little to the “spooky painting” subgenre of Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories — Vernon Lee’s Amour Dure, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Schalken the Painter and, of course, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. In tales such as these, paintings traffic in the uncanny. They have the power to possess their viewers and even act as portals to other times and places. Actually, Lee, aka Violet Paget, a friend and disciple of Henry James and Walter Pater, was particularly interested in the aesthetics of empathy and used her ghost stories to explore the physical transformations that she believed art could wreak. Her take on aesthetic theory advocated a collapsing of the boundaries between past and present, and between individuals. On the basis of The Swan Thieves I’d say that Kostova is a fan.
The set-up is tantalising. An acclaimed artist, Robert Oliver, has been arrested for attacking a painting in the National Gallery in Washington DC — a rendition of the Leda myth, according to which Zeus assumed the form of a swan to rape (“seduce” in some versions) Leda, the Queen of Sparta, on the same night that she slept with her husband, Tyndareus.
Oliver is committed to a smart private institution with the wonderfully Hollywoodish name Goldengroves, where his psychiatrist, Dr Marlow, who is reputed to be able to “get a stone to talk”, attempts to coax an explanation out of him. But Oliver prefers scowling to speaking. So Marlow, himself an aspiring artist, tries an art therapy approach. He equips Oliver with painting supplies and, two days later, finds that his patient has produced an eerily alive-seeming portrait of a mysterious woman with dark, curly hair and “an amused, sensuous mouth”. Oliver is obsessed with this woman and feels compelled to paint her repeatedly, apparently from memory.
Marlow strikes out on a quest for information about her, along the way exhibiting a blatant disregard for medical ethics, especially patient confidentiality. He drives from Washington to North Carolina to visit Oliver’s ex-wife, Kate, subjecting her to a series of gruelling, intrusive interviews about their awful marriage. Later, he will befriend one of Oliver’s former students, Mary.
Advertisement
Marlow is our main narrator, which isn’t always the pleasure it might have been: he’s rather mannered, even reptilian, and his prissily ritualised bachelorhood seems to us a fixed and natural state long after love has supposedly worked its softening magic. (At one point he feels the need to reassure someone that he is “not Humbert Humbert” — never a great chat-up line.) The other narrators, Kate and Mary, are vocalised through him, either via journals they have kept — Kostova loves Victorian epistolary devices — or interpolated interview material. Scattered among their accounts are translations of some old letters that Oliver has lent Marlow. They are in French and turn out to be the earnest and increasingly intimate correspondence of two 19th-century painters on the fringes of French Impressionism, Olivier Vignot and B?atrice de Clerval. Vignot is a much older man — de Clerval’s husband’s uncle. How did Oliver come to possess the letters? And is there a connection between them and the mysterious, curly-haired woman?
Intriguingly, Kostova denies Oliver the chance to tell his story: he is the aggregate of others’ accounts of him. These accounts are thorough, and thoroughly unflattering. For long stretches the novel throws off its historical-quest-thriller shackles and becomes something totally different: a study of the male creative ego — its habit of sucking the life out of those it lives among, especially women; its assumed right to indulge itself, no matter the domestic consequences. (In a sense, then, The Swan Thieves is a vampire novel after all.) The Swan Thieves is too long and loses momentum during Mary’s unnecessarily detailed account of her relationship with Oliver. It also romanticises art and artists to a degree that some will find excessive. That said, it’s an atmospheric, richly entertaining piece of work, much more ambitious than The Historian, and retains a human scale even when it’s nudging its readers in supernatural directions. Unusually, Kostova writes about the past more confidently than she does of the present. De Clerval and Vignot’s letters are especially well done, the barely suppressed yearning on both sides communicated with skill and tenderness.
Another of its achievements is to rescue Impressionism from place mats and tote bags and remind us of the radical passions that inspired it. De Clerval remembers standing in a Paris gallery, “humbled, in front of those canvases the newspapers revile”, understanding that the artists involved are “accomplishing revolutionary things”. She, you see, can empathise where Oliver can only obsess. That is what makes her the better painter.
Little, Brown, £16.99; Buy this book, 576pp